Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
I'm not sure that's true. At least in the North American context, "efficient car movement" pretty much guarantees crappy cities. It means people will live car-centered lifestyles, which is incompatible with good urbanity.
Major cities shouldn't have "efficient car movement". That usually means something is seriously wrong.
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in and out of downtowns, not so much, I agree. Not a good formula for a healthy downtown centre.
In suburban areas and for regional transportation? Highways are absolutely critical.
As I said initially - we have to understand what infrastructure choices we are making and where which kinds of infrastructure makes sense. The Dutch model is to generally push traffic to highways and limited access roads, which makes driving much safer and takes traffic away from pedestrian areas. Which is why tourists who don't rent cars when visiting the Netherlands often think there are very few cars, because they simply don't see them. The reality is that much of the Netherlands, especially outside of the major cities, sees only marginally lower rates of automotive ownership and use than in North America.
I am generally a big supporter of building large highways and small local streets. Stroads are terrible pieces of infrastructure that work for nobody. Freeways are generally excellent pieces of infrastructure however, other than where they shovel large numbers of cars into downtowns at the expense of transit. which in turn causes downtowns to become traffic sewers and parking lots.
The original point of this thread however was discussing the concept of Induced Demand - which while an actual phenomenon, is generally severely misunderstood by the general public and is absolutely not what the OP article implied which is that any and all road projects are entirely pointless.